I did try to tackle Love as a subject in my book Judgement Day, so now I want to see if I can link dreams, magic, faith and love, and make sense of them.

If the idea of making sense of love and dreams is off-putting, I understand. But I hope you bear with me while I try to explore them in a way which does not degrade them into being oddities of human behaviour but as valued tools. It seems to me they must be valuable or we wouldn’t have them and love for them all so much.

In other places I have talked about how our lives are embedded in situations which have four significant tracks, to be considered whenever we think about our thinking, judgement, and decision making.

I think dreams can be seen as playing a valuable role in making sense of complexity, and if we record them we may be able to see our future in terms of risk and urgency. So sleeping dreams may well be worth looking into, but I am thinking more about our dreams as aspirations, which are definitely holistic and definitely get spoilt by too much rationalisation.

Without some kind of dream laden aspiration we would never take risks, never have close friends or lovers, never venture into any business that wasn’t pretty sound and reasonable. This of course would not be good for the society we live in, it would get dull, everything would become habit, all value would drain away.

To avoid constant attack from our left hemisphere wanting justification for our actions, wanting substantiation for our beliefs, it is really good to believe in a bit of magic. Sometimes we can win through against all the odds, somehow we might find that perfect partner, somehow we could beat the odds and be the next billionaire based on some geeky idea we have had since we were 16.

Magic is a ‘don’t knock on this door sign’, and mostly we respect it. So when our friend suggests he might have a chance with that fabulous looking ‘other’ we occasionally tease but only to egg them on, to push them into consolidating that belief in possibility. (Well, we do this if we are true friends.)

We support them when they apply for jobs which we might think are way beyond their skills and experiences, and in the other extreme should they fall very ill, we believe in their ability to get well, until they indicate that they no longer wish us to hold to that and ask to be allowed to move on.

So magic is one of the tools in our ‘determination’ toolkit, a way of saying to ourselves, no matter what it looks like, we will endure, we will succeed.

Complementary to magic is faith, and sometimes the two may not seem far apart.

We are creatures with Multiple minds, built up over all our lives into elaborate ways of handling the many different kinds of tasks we face. So we need a way to handle all the inconsistencies of those minds, and we resolve them through overarching belief in some supreme goodness, something which says not everything lives with unresolvable contradictions, some things can be simplified,, by following basic principles of living, in association with the idea of God, or gods, or just an identified sense of there being right and wrong.

Without such a sense of overarching right and wrong we can delude ourselves into thinking that we alone are the arbiters of what is right and what is wrong, everything is relative, so our perspective is as good as anyone else’s.

Such a relative ownership of reality is a philosophy adopted by some, but it is hardly the most useful philosophy, as it contains the kind of egocentrism which leads to constant conflict.

Dreams, magic, and faith, are all ways in which we are allowing ourselves to value things, value ideas, value people with ideas and behaviours however odd, to create something more than us as individuals, to emerge as something of value one step above the common and everyday.

I am sure love is many different things, but I am also sure it is closely linked to dreams, magic and faith. For love to occur the mind that wants to count everything has to relent. The focused, reason-based judge of everything has to move away, it has to disconnect from all judgement, so that love can be absent of judgement, so it can be universal, it can connect to us as we feel whole persons again.

The moment of falling in love is often unexpected, because only when we abandon judgement without thinking we have are we open enough to allow it in. If we start scoring points on anything we will be lessening the chance that the magic moment will occur.

It may be that it is when we have become supremely tired of our own judgemental way of being that we are most open to love. It may be that we have pushed our reasoning self to the limit, and need a long break, and then it happens.

Dreams, magic, faith and love, all things which strengthen our selves as full and engaged people. And of course, with that, the danger, the pitfalls, the contradictions, the blindness.

Reflecting on our faith, our dreams, our desire for magic and love, does provide a balance, from time to time. Box ticking would never be much use, because the boxes were not even being considered when these things were growing.

No, these things can only be overseen by a deeper sense of intuition, a sense of being confident that dreams, faith, magic and love can be matured into something better.

Love, dreams, magic, and faith, what brings out our sense of being human, and indeed, it is what makes us human, and not machines.

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About Graham Rawlinson

I now have 5 books published as Ebooks http://amzn.to/iOyowj. They feel like part of a life's work, somehow all the different jobs I have had in my life, from postman to psychologist to facilitator of inventions and running a food business, they all build into a way of loving life, the ups and the downs. I hope you like the blogs I write, and then like the books I write. I hope you will want to take some time out of your life to share some thoughts with me.
For that, I thank you.
Graham